The Great Stain by Noel Rae

Author:Noel Rae [RAE, NOEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS056000, HIS036050, HIS036000
ISBN: 9781468315141
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Many of slavery’s defenders were ready to admit that there were cruel masters, but claimed that these were exceptions to an otherwise benevolent institution; as one popular argument ran, just because some husbands murdered their wives, and some wives their husbands, it did not follow that marriage should be abolished. It was also claimed that most cases of brutality were the work of overzealous drivers, who were themselves Negro slaves, or of owners belonging to the lower levels of white society. On the other hand, to be a servant in the household of a well-to-do family that spent half the year on a plantation and half in town, was to enjoy a carefree life of easy duties and mutual affection.

Unfortunately for this comforting belief, two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, knew better, and felt morally obliged to say so out loud; and since they were the daughters of Judge Grimké of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and a leading member of Charleston society, their testimony carried weight. For their boldness the two sisters were ostracized and had to move to Philadelphia, where Angelina married the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, with whom she wrote and edited American Slavery As It Is. Sarah was the first to publish, which she did in 1830:

“As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of the tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar; but this may not, cannot be; they come over my memory like gory specters, and implore me with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Savior, in the name of humanity; for the sake of the slaveholder as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the southern prison house.” Of particular importance was the fact that “the actors in these tragedies were all men and women of the highest respectability, and of the first families in South Carolina, and, with one exception, citizens of Charleston; and that their cruelties did not in the slightest degree affect their standing in society.

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